I ran across a resident of Santiago de Puriscal on one of the Costa Rica forums recently.
As the crow flies that’s about ten miles from our place. (Were Guacimo de Atenas) I’m not sure if we can see her place from ours, but we CAN see Puriscal. On a very clear day, we can see individual homes/buildings.

Connie wrote on the forum that since March 20, they had had 65 inches of rain! I was flabbergasted because we have had less than five inches!

All the experts talk about the microclimates at work in Costa Rica and this is the perfect illustration.

Here’s what she reports -

We’re about 3 km southwest of the centro of Santiago de Puriscal. Hwy 239 (that is part of the route to Quepos/Parrita) runs in front of our house. Our elevation is about 3,900 ft /1190 m a.s.l.

We got 5.1 inches on Friday and about 3/4 inch today (won’t know for today until I check it in the morning and enter it in the records I’m keeping). My rain gauge goes up to 6 inches. When we’re away overnight, our gardener notes the rainfall amounts. As of today, since March 20th, we have averaged 1.03 inches of rain per day in the last 68 days. The total as of today (Saturday, May 26) is 70.2 inches. I don’t know the maximum we’ve gotten, but I did have a day last year where I emptied my old 5 inch rain gauge twice in one day! I started keeping a log of daily rainfall after we got our new rain gauge. We did actually have a dry seaon this year of ~2 1/2 months, with only a few very light sprinkles, up until March 20th.

We frequently have fog in the afternoons when the clouds bump into the mountains. We are not right at the top of a mountain or ridge, but just about 200 feet below it.

I’m glad there are people like Connie that can live in those conditions. I’m already whining about the late afternoon showers and how the clouds really screw up my day.

So a few miles away and a few hundred feet higher, they are living in another climate entirely.

Sunday Stealing: The Imaginary Meme, Part One

We watch tee vee from the U.S. from time to time (when the rain keeps us indoors.) Gonna have to break that habit because we hate the tee vee commercials from the chain restaurants. We prefer the ones advertised on YellowPages.com.

We both are jonesin’ for some Americun foods… I have already told Bulbous that when I visit, I just want to eat junk food and watch the Big Ass TeeVee in High Definition. A combo of vegging out and pigging out. (Watching via the internet really sucks here because there just isn’t the bandwidth yet at Casa de Boondocks.)

Get this: chain restaurants are booming! Check out this infographic:

For some reason, the little girls like me. To a grumpy old man (which I CAN be) this can be rather off-putting. It’s been a long long time since our girls were this little. But we made some pretty good memories at the time and I think I made some good memories with the two latest young girls in my life.

A while back Abby came to visit from Tennessee along with her Granny who is raising her. Abby is eight. We had a great time while she was here, mostly because she isn’t your normal 8 year old girl. (Is there such a thing?)  Abby didn’t bug me, she didn’t whine, she wasn’t demanding, she loved to help – and she followed directions. Remember the line from On Golden Pond?

What’s the point of having a dwarf if they don’t do chores?

When Abby was around the hardest thing for me was finding chores for her. She can’t mow the lawn or clean the gutters, so she was the designated pool-cleaner.

Now Nazareth, the 7 year old daughter of our housecleaner, has taken a liking to me.  I put her to work running some Spanish flashcards by Nancy. She shows Nancy the card with a word and then pronounces it very slowly. Amarillo is AH-MA-REE-JO. She surprised us by then saying Yellow.  I guess she’s been holding out on us that she knows some English. Not uncommon, just as we are reluctant to use Spanish, many Spanish speakers are hesitant to use English.

Today, she sat with me at the table and colored in her Little Mermaid book. She gave me a refresher course in Spanish of the colors.

When I got tired of that I started her pool-cleaning internship.

She should be in school. Hanging around me she’ll only pick up bad habits.

I started her tutorial on pool-cleaning.

SIR-BAY-SAH.